World's last manual typewriter factory has just 500 left (Business Standard)

By AUBREY COHEN, seattlepi.com

Updated 12:10 pm, Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Photo: INDRANIL MUKHERJEE, /AFP/Getty Images

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Purushottam Sakhare types an affidavit on Feb. 15, 2011 on a sidewalk outside a city court in Mumbai, India.

Purushottam Sakhare types an affidavit on Feb. 15, 2011 on a sidewalk outside a city court in Mumbai, India.

Photo: INDRANIL MUKHERJEE, /AFP/Getty Images

World's last manual typewriter factory has just 500 left (Business Standard)

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Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story was incorrect. While Godrej & Boyce was the last company in the world making manual typewriters, other companies still make electric typewriters, according to the Chicago Tribune.

If you want to buy a new manual typewriter, you had better hurry.

India's Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Co. was the last company in the world to make the once ubiquitous devices, until it stopped production in 2009. Now, it only has 500 left in stock, according to India's Business Standard.

The fact that the company still has 500 of the 2009 machines is a sign of how far the typewriter has fallen, even in India, which is known for its streetside typists. After all, Godrej's production peaked at 50,000 a year in the 1990s and still was 10,000 to 12,000 until the end, the Business Standard reported.

The change at Godrej also mirrors the development of India. The company now makes a huge range of products, including such consumer items as refrigerators, microwaves, washing machines and air conditioners.

One interesting note is that the theoretical role of typwriters has not completely vanished, even in the United States. After all, people still find themselves needing to fill in paper forms that don't come as fill-out-able PDFs.

This includes such utterly formal documents as job applications, documents it would have been unthinkable to hand write a couple of decades ago. It's like society informally decided keeping a typewriter around just for those few occassions when you had a formal form to fill out didn't make sense, so hand writing these things became OK.

But that's where we find ourselves, with only 500 new typewriters left in the world. If you want one, they cost up to 12,000 rupees, about $270, not counting shipping from India.